American Pharaoh (76 page)

As they did every four years, downtown business leaders came together to form a Non-Partisan Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Daley.
The business leaders had the usual reasons for supporting him. Some wanted him to keep up his urban renewal efforts in the
Loop, and others wanted help with development projects of their own. Committee cochairman C. Virgil Martin was president of
the company that held the lucrative restaurant concession at O’Hare. The city’s business titans made large contributions to
Daley’s campaign, but the machine was also skilled at extracting money from small contributors who wanted specific favors,
ranging from lowered tax assessments to the kind of minor perks the machine specialized in. “There are lots of goofs out there,”
Waner said later. “Here’s a guy that is maybe cum laude from some college and has a very successful business, but he is obsessed
with the idea that he has got to have a three-letter license number, which is a very simple thing for a politician to do.
He sends him a three-letter license number, then someone will come around and say, ‘So and so is running for office. Would
you care to make a little contribution?’ He takes out a checkbook and sends a few thousand dollars.”
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The machine’s dominance left Waner with few places to raise money for his own campaign. When he tried to put together his
own committee of businessmen, he found that even die-hard Republicans had already committed themselves to Daley. He held a
$100-a-plate fund-raising dinner, the kind of event Republican candidates were usually able to pack with wealthy contributors,
and it lost money. Waner did manage to convince one prominent Republican, John T. Pirie Jr., chairman of a downtown department
store, to raise funds for him. But shortly after Pirie signed on he backed out, hailing Daley for his “truly remarkable achievements.”
Waner commented bitterly that Daley’s camp “probably told him they’d tear up the sidewalk in front of his store.” In the end,
Waner’s total campaign budget was about $175,000, much of it his own money. John Lindsay, the man whose candidacy the Republicans
were using as a model, had spent $3 million to be elected in New York two years earlier.
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Some of Waner’s supporters were urging him to make a bid for white-backlash voters, but he ran a campaign that was more pro–
civil rights than Daley’s. Waner hammered away at Daley for being “more interested in maintaining plantation politics in public
housing” than in solving the problems of those who lived there. At the same time, he was not prepared to write off his Republican
base by backing open housing. Waner argued that other issues, such as jobs and urban renewal policies, were ultimately of
greater importance to the black community. “Since 1960, the city has displaced over 50,000 people, and after the new buildings
went up, no one could afford to move back into the new neighborhood,” he said. “There was no attempt made to provide decent
low-cost homes for rent or for purchase.” Democrats preferred to have blacks trapped in public housing, Waner charged, “because
it enables the Democratic precinct captain to corral votes for the machine.”
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As he always did, Daley got to work energizing the machine to turn out a large vote. The second important stage in the campaign,
after the filing of petitions, was the February 28 primary. Daley called a secret meeting of the machine inner circle — including
county assessor Parky Cullerton, city clerk John Marcin, 5th Ward committeeman and city treasurer candidate Marshall Korshak,
29th Ward state senator Bernard Neistein, and Democratic state chairman James Ronan — and told them he wanted to win with
400,000 votes, up from the 396,473 he received four years earlier. When the votes were counted, the machine more than met
this benchmark, pulling out 420,000 votes for him, far ahead of the 72,000 Waner attracted in the Republican primary. Daley
could also take comfort in the fact that he outpolled Marcin and Marshall Korshak. Waner tried to put a positive spin on the
results. “With 50,000 employees and their families, Mayor Daley can produce 400,000 votes at will in a primary,” he said.
“But when the voters turn out and don’t have to reveal their party, they will defeat the last big city machine in the country,
April 4.”
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After the primary, Daley gathered his ward committeemen for a meeting at party headquarters at the Sherman House Hotel. He
informed the ward committeemen who had not produced 8,000 votes — their one-fiftieth share of his 400,000-vote goal — that
they had to do better in the general election. On March 14, Daley announced that the federal government had approved almost
$46 million in federal grants for his planned transit lines along the Dan Ryan and Kennedy expressways. The timing was obviously
political — yet another favor Daley managed to extract from the Johnson administration — but Daley denied it. “It is a customary
program for a dynamic city,” he said. “It had nothing to do with the election.” Daley also had city employees working overtime
to clean up the city before the election. Sanitation workers were putting in six-day weeks filling potholes, and Bureau of
Electricity employees were working nine-hour days, six days a week rushing to finish installation of lighting in all 2,300
alleys in Chicago.
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Martin Luther King ended up helping Daley’s reelection campaign in a backhanded way. King was in Chicago March 24 to speak
to an anti–Vietnam War rally at Liberty Baptist Church. Asked about housing, he lamented the city’s “failure to live up to
last summer’s open-housing agreement.” After reviewing a report prepared by the Chicago Freedom Movement’s evaluation committee,
King said it might be necessary to hold even bigger open-housing marches over the upcoming summer. Daley immediately struck
back, charging King with making “political” statements designed to hurt him in the election. No matter what King said, Daley
promised, he would not permit civil rights marchers to disrupt the city. It was the second year in a row Daley attacked King
on the eve of an election, and Republicans were convinced it was a bald attempt to win the white backlash vote. In fact, Daley
had spent the last four years using the race issue to appeal to white voters. In 1963, he was a politician with a strong black
base, whose urban-renewal programs appeared to be destabilizing the city’s black community — and, the fear was, driving them
into white neighborhoods. By 1967, he had a strong record of racial resistance: standing up for Willis; forcing the federal
government to release the school funding Francis Keppel had withheld; going to court to enjoin civil rights marches in white
neighborhoods; moving blacks into housing projects in the ghetto and keeping them out of white projects; and presiding over
the housing summit that ended the Chicago Freedom Movement and sent King home to Atlanta. Daley’s political realignment seemed
to be working. Polls showed him running far more strongly in the Bungalow Belt than he had against Adamowski four years earlier.
The
Chicago Tribune
reported that its interviews with voters showed that those who had been “grumbling about Daley’s concessions to Negroes”
were now backing him because “they decided Daley was a seasoned veteran of such problems.”
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Daley won in a landslide, taking 73 percent of the vote and winning all fifty wards. His 792,238 votes surpassed his previous
record of 778,612 votes in 1959. Dick Gregory, who in the end ran as a write-in candidate, took less than 1 percent of the
vote. The polls that detected the white ethnic neighborhoods shifting back toward Daley turned out to be correct. In 1963,
his support in nonreform white wards had fallen to 44 percent; this time, he took 69 percent of the vote in these same wards.
In the race against Adamowski, Daley had won 66 percent of the vote in Tom Keane’s 31st Ward, a weak performance in one of
the machine’s strongest wards; this time he took almost 84 percent. It was a testament to Daley’s skill in handling the race
issue — and to the hold the machine still had on black voters — that his support in the black wards had eroded only slightly
in four years, from 84.1 percent to 83.8 percent. Daley defeated Waner in the heavily black West Side 24th Ward 15,336 to
918, with 351 write-in votes cast for Dick Gregory, compared to 17,429 to 968 against Adamowski in 1963. There is no single
answer to the intriguing question of why Daley, who had spent the last year at logger-heads with Martin Luther King Jr., fared
so well among black voters. In part, it was due to his careful expressions of support for equal opportunity and improving
conditions in the slums, even while he co-opted the Freedom Movement’s attempts to take on those issues. It helped, certainly,
that the Republican Waner was not a particularly appealing candidate for black voters, and that Gregory was not officially
listed on the ballot. But Daley’s success in the black wards was at least in part a quiet rebuke to the Chicago Freedom Movement,
and a reminder of the power of a political spoils system to deliver the votes of the poor. The goals of the Freedom Movement
did not always speak to the immediate needs of poor blacks. Many did not aspire to move into hostile all-white neighborhoods,
or to put their children onto buses to attend schools in white neighborhoods. Daley’s precinct captains, in contrast, offered
things that did make a difference in their daily lives: help in getting welfare and public housing; assistance in navigating
a confusing government bureaucracy; and, most of all, patronage jobs. Daley had relied on machine politics to overcome idealism
among black voters, and the election returns showed that, at least this time, his strategy had worked.
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On election night, Daley promised that he would continue his hard line on disruptions of the peace. “No one is going to take
the law into his own hands,” he said in his victory statement at Democratic headquarters in the Sherman House. “There will
be law and order in this city as long as I am mayor.” The following day, he expanded on his pledge. “There will be no demonstrations
that close off traffic or interfere with people’s rights,” he said. “We won’t prohibit demonstrations and marches, but we
say they cannot conflict with your rights as a private citizen. If you are driving home or on a bus, no one has the right
to hold you up.” Daley also promised that there would be more development in the next four years than in the previous four.
Among his plans were replacing the elevated tracks that circle the Loop with a subway, and building a third Chicago airport
on a man-made island in the middle of Lake Michigan. On May 9, President Johnson and the Democratic leadership in Congress
honored Daley as Democrat of the Year for 1967. The award gave Daley a national platform to speak out about his encounters
with political demonstrators, and the importance of standing up to them firmly. “I believe in civil rights, but with law and
order in our streets, and not with disorder,” Daley said. “Today we have many faint hearts in our party.”
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The War on Poverty — and particularly Chicago’s self-styled version of it — remained as controversial as ever. On May 18,
a Senate subcommittee came to town to investigate the Chicago program once again. New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob
Javits repeated the standard line about machine domination of the Chicago program. When his questioning of Daley failed to
produce any damaging admissions, Javits moved on to Deton Brooks, challenging him about his work in the reelection campaign
of Roman Pucinski while he was director of the Chicago anti-poverty program. Javits had brought along a memorandum that quoted
Brooks as saying, when asked about his political work for the machine, “I’ll do what I darn please.” When the hearing ended,
Javits expressed his suspicions that Daley had hijacked the program. “It is not easy to find proof, but there is a heavy overtone
that it is being politically run,” he said. “I’m not persuaded that the Chicago system gives the poor representation on community
boards.” But the Democratic senators on the committee — including New York’s Robert Kennedy and chairman Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania
— came to Daley’s defense. Chicago’s program was no worse, they said, than programs in many other cities.
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Civil rights activists also continued to speak out against the way the War on Poverty was being run both in Chicago and nationally.
Chester Robinson, director of the West Side Organization, charged that War on Poverty programs were still failing to address
the greatest forms of deprivation in poor people’s lives. “What good does it do a poor person if the Great Society takes his
child for a tour of the art museum?” Robinson asked. “The child still has to come back to the same rat-infested, overcrowded,
underheated slum tenement, go back down to the same overcrowded, understaffed slum school and bear the same burden of his
father’s inability to get a good-paying job.”
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But by the spring of 1967, more of the criticism of the War on Poverty was coming from conservatives. The growing Black Power
movement had by now reached new heights of militancy. Stokely Carmichael resigned as chairman of SNCC in May to travel to
Cuba and Vietnam. He left behind a successor, H. Rap Brown, who was even more confrontational. “If you give me a gun I might
just shoot Lady Bird,” Brown declared. The violent rhetoric coming out of the black liberation movement was contributing to
a phenomenon that the national media had seemingly fallen in love with: white backlash. Some of the backlash was aimed at
CAP, which was increasingly identified in the minds of white America with radical black politics. In Houston, the mayor accused
anti-poverty program employees of contributing to racial unrest that culminated in a gun battle at Texas Southern University,
the state’s largest historically black college. In Alabama, Governor Wallace charged that $500,000 in grants to programs in
Wilcox and Lowndes counties amounted to funding the Black Panthers, which began as a black political party in Lowndes County.
Even in Chicago, where Daley and Brooks were keeping a close eye on CAP, there were charges that War on Poverty money was
being diverted to fund civil rights protests. Washington handed critics a new argument for opposing the program when The Woodlawn
Organization was given a $927,000 grant to hire gang members to provide job training to other gang members. The money went
directly from Washington to TWO, bypassing the local Daley-controlled board, the CCUO. By the end of the year, it would come
out that eight of the staff hired by TWO had been charged with or convicted of serious crimes, including a twenty-one-year-old
“center chief ” who had been charged with murdering a thirteen-year-old boy.
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“This is the only program not included under the jurisdiction of the city of Chicago,” Daley fumed when the staff’s brushes
with the criminal justice system came to light. “People say we should have participation by outside agencies and we are for
this,” he said. “But we feel it has to be under some direction.” Daley eventually convinced the OEO to cut off funding to
the group.
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